Ancient throwing dart reveals first archaeological evidence of castoreum
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Alpine ice patches were caribou and sheep hunting territories for southern Yukon First Nations people for thousands of years. With increasing global temperatures, well-preserved projectile weapons that were frozen for centuries are now melting out of the ice. The study of organic residues on recovered projectiles is part of a larger effort to learn about traditional hunting technology. Here we identify the residue on a recently recovered, 6000-year-old throwing dart as castoreum, harvested from the castor sacs of butchered beavers. FTIR spectroscopy and pyrolysis-GC-MS analysis of the residue indicated substituted phenols, phenolic dimers, coumarins and xanthenes as well as cholesterol derivatives and traces of protein. Comparative analysis of reference material extracted from the castor sacs of recently trapped beavers confirmed the identity of the residue as castoreum. This finding represents the earliest evidence of castoreum use in the fabrication of weaponry and the first chemical identification of this material in the archaeological record.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".